Monsters Galore

I just read a great book - Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma - and I’ve been wrestling with how to write about it. The dilemma is this: I’m worried that if I tell you about it, I will ruin it, and then you won’t want to read it, when, actually, you really really need to read it. Claire Dederer considers the problem of the monstrous male artist whose works of art are undeniably great. Can we as fans still love Roman Polanski’s and Woody Allen’s movies, or the music of Michael Jackson, knowing what they have been accused of doing? That’s the thesis of the book but Dederer uses that question as the jumping-off point to consider a dozen other topics that needs naturally from one idea to the next. The book is so wide-ranging and yet so conversational, that I felt reading it as though I were sitting at a coffee shop with her, having the kind of intense and hilarious discussion that makes you instantly into best friends.

Do you see why I’m being vague? If I were to have one of those conversations and then come back and relate it to you, you would feel annoyed and left out, like, “Oh I guess she’s your new best friend now, and not me?” She writes about female monsters and when we become monsters ourselves, and ultimately answers her thesis question in a very satisfying way. [Thanks to my friend Chris for sending this book to me. I felt so seen by this gift.]

Since I won’t say more about Dederer’s monsters, I thought I’d share an idea I came up with the other day: The Monster Spectrum. It’s possible this already exists, by the way. It’s a categorization of movie/TV monsters by size. At the small end of the scale are microbes/yeast/viruses. Next, we have little creatures, like Gremlins and Chuckie. Then we have medium-sized creatures, like dogs (Cujo) and sharks (Jaws). Then there’s a wide swath of human monsters, some of which are the embodiment of a smaller monster (like a zombie that is the host of a virus) and some are just awful people, like serial killers. The next category is cyborgs, followed by robots. Next up: aliens, obviously. Think Predator and the mother from Alien. Finally, you have your large creatures, usually dragons, but also dinosaurs. Here’s a picture of the spectrum that I drew while I was thinking about it.

Just so you have a window into my brain, please know that I had no reason to write this down except I thought of it. My mind is a strange place; do other people regularly walk around doing this?

Finally, two little monster stories. When I was a kid, I lived in Huntington, Indiana, and rode a school bus every day. In the afternoons, the bus had to drive a couple of kids down this road that hadn’t been completely developed, so after the first 5 houses, it was empty lots. It was a cul de sac and at the end were woods. The bus would turn around in the cul de sac. Every day I swore that I saw a shack deep in the woods and I would strain my eyes to see if someone lived there. All the kids on the bus talked about whether they could see the shack (not everyone could, apparently) and who might live there. A daily battle raged about whether it was an ax murderer, a mummy, a zombie, or a witch. The monster never revealed themselves, but I was in the ax murderer camp, as I believed I had seen a man with a white beard and overalls and an ax chasing after the bus once.

Unrelated: my parents hosted a Halloween party in 1981 or ‘82. Everyone’s costumes were supposed to be a surprise and optimally it would be a masked party, where people didn’t recognize one another at first. I may be adding this part. Since I was only 7 or 8, I didn’t recognize anyone except my mother, and my aunt Rita, who was visiting. Rita was a Dominican nun, and she wore her full habit, and everyone thought it was the best costume over. But I digress.

My father’s boss came as a table and sat under the table cloth the whole night, probably happily drinking alone, and was only discovered when he got up and moved. Hilarity ensued. I digress again.

One guest though was sort of terrifying to me. She was a tall woman with long black hair and large breasts, wrapped like a mummy in bloodied bandages. No one seemed to know who it was. The woman was quiet and wouldn’t answer questions except by nodding her head. At one point, she stared at me, and it scared me so much I left the room. I began the reconsider who lived in the shack in the woods, wondering if it was this mummy woman. I stood at the edge of the living room, watching her. Finally, I began to look around for my father and realized that if he was there, I didn’t recognize him in his costume. On my next furtive glimpse at the mummy, I realized it was my father. He must have known that I recognized him because he gave me a little wink.